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Asbestos history repeating

ELIZABETH JACKSON: If you caught Foreign Correspondent on ABC TV last Tuesday, you might have been as shocked as I was to see a story about asbestos roofing products in India.

The program also explored the not-widely-known role of Canada which, although it's spending millions removing asbestos from its parliament and other buildings, is still happily shipping asbestos ore off to India.

In fact plans are underway in Canada at the moment to triple its asbestos exports and most of them are likely to end up in India.

The reporter who told the story is Matt Peacock, who over the years has also told the tragic asbestos story in Australia, and particularly the role of this country's notorious former asbestos cement manufacturer James Hardie.

I asked Matt to record some of his thoughts about the latest asbestos tragedy developing in India.

MAMTT PEACOCK: Working on this week's Foreign Correspondent edition was a strange experience. There I was, suited up in a respirator, puffing over some toxic asbestos tailings in the Roro Hills near Chaibasa.

But for me what was stranger was how similar the experience was to one I had 30 years ago, in the ABC science unit, when I drove into Baryulgil near Grafton and noticed how the dirt road had suddenly turned white. There was no doubt what the pile of white dust was that the kids in the school yard were playing in. It was all asbestos tailings, capable of causing cancer decades later.

That was James Hardie's Aboriginal asbestos mine. Now in India, it was the mine abandoned by India's major asbestos cement manufacturer, Hyderabad Industries.

And here too, the spokesman for the asbestos industry was trotting out the same well-worn propaganda lines that James Hardie's doctor, Terry McCullagh did all those years ago.

This is only white asbestos. It doesn't give you cancer. Never mind that the World Health Organization, the ILO and countless other national and international medical authorities tell you it does. We know different.

And then they say in effect, well if it really does kill, then show me the bodies. If this cancer-causing dust really is killing people, where are they all?

The answer of course is that it takes 20, 30 or even 40 years before they get the diseases and by that time the people who lived or worked in the tailings are scattered to the four winds. When they die, invariable there's no autopsy, no sample of lung tissue, no proof to establish the cause of death.

But what does happen in that time is that the asbestos company changes.

James Hardie Asbestos for example, dumped the name and the product and moved into non-asbestos alternatives.

India's Hyderabad Industries will do the same. It figures it has about 10 years of marketing asbestos cement.

By then of course the damage will be done and in years to come, apart from lumbering the Indian government with a huge medical bill, there'll be the problem we face here in Australia of how to clean it up safely.

Meanwhile this industry rolls on in India, all with the assistance and encouragement of the Canadian government, who for decades has been promoting its cancer-causing exports and where the industry still won't die. In fact there are plans by the Indian-born Montreal entrepreneur Baljit Chadha to reopen the Jeffrey mine and if that happens, Canada's production will more than triple; most of it bound for India.

Years ago, James Hardie's doctor Terry McCullagh suggested the company employ only older people, because they'd then be dead by the time they would develop any asbestos-related diseases.

In India in 1971 an executive of the British asbestos giant Turner & Newall suggested that the benefits of asbestos water pipes and roofing far outweighed the hazards for people in developing nations where life expectancy wasn't long enough for them to get sick from asbestos.

These days though Indians can expect to live beyond their 60s. That is, unless they've been breathing asbestos.

ELIZABETH JACKSON: Matt Peacock with those thoughts. And Matt is also the author of a book about James Hardie entitled Killer Company.